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London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

btp.police.uk

361–370 of 534 posts

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#361
post #53

It’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers. I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time. I don’t want people being surpr…

Frankly this is the least of the problems we have.

There seems to be a big lack of perspective and priorities, as well as consideration of root cause of things like surveillance, and perhaps this is by design.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#363
To provide clarity, this isn't (yet) (publicly) hooked up to the whole CCTV network of London Underground stations. Instead they use these temporary portable stations you can see at the end of the linked article.

I went to Victoria station where they were doing this yesterday and the police seemed quite unhappy with me taking photos of them operating the facial recognition station and confronted me almost immediately. The irony...

The area they were doing it in was completely swarming with far more police officers than usual, supposedly to "provide information".

I had expected to see signs all around the station warning passengers that this trial was taking place, but the only ones I saw were directly in that area or by the stairs as you're walking down into it. They weren't small enough that I could characterise them as intentionally hard-to-miss, but I reckon with the amount of traffic going down that staircase, the overwhelming majority of people would not have actually been aware that they were being subject to this LFR trial. I didn't see a single person other than myself pausing to read the signs.

Edit: There also wasn't a single sign inside the gateline where you'd tap out and walk into the area that the camera station was pointing at. I asked the police why this was, and they claimed it was because the cameras are only positioned to capture people entering the station, not exiting. Maybe that's true, as long as you don't turn around at any point? I'm not convinced.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#364
post #53

It’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers. I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time. I don’t want people being surpr…

No government or enforcement agency will ever say no to more power.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#365
post #53

It’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers. I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time. I don’t want people being surpr…

To add: same happened in russia around 2018 on a couple of subway stations in St.-Pete and in moscow at first the result? faster tracking and arrests of people for checks who were deemed too problematic + (i.e. with anti-war protests in 2022) the cameras were used to track or threat tracking almost everyone who protested, and lowering the load on the police by coming to the dwellings afterwards in the next several da…

It's worth pointing out this is specifically not mass tracking. LFR scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#366
post #53

It’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers. I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time. I don’t want people being surpr…

It's worth being aware the current police implementation of police LFR is explicitly not doing "tracking": it scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#367

The issue with all this surveillance is that it always ends up with suppression of dissent and silencing of opposition by abusing enforcement agencies. All such surveillance should start with 24-hour live video feed of private lives of all politicians... they carry immense power and control, and thus, warrant an equally powerful monitoring and scrutiny compared to common people.

This is never going to fly, and expecting it is waste of time and energy that could have been used more productively. Think for a second or two about the type of folks who get, succeed and even thrive in politics over decades. Not your regular Joe, not a nice friendly balanced individual. No, biggest fuckups with massive daddy issues, school bullies, unresolvable inferiority complexes, sociopaths to the core, for who…

Why... because you can use their own argument to make your case as a common person... for example, you just gave one of those: "...to expose all their deep flaws to whole world?" Everyone has those.. why should common people give away those.

It's not about making it happen on them.. it's about forcing them to defend this application on them.. and then using the same argument to application on common people...

As The Joker famously said: "It's about sending a message" lol :)

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#368
post #53

It’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers. I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time. I don’t want people being surpr…

And the thing that absolutely fucks me off about all of this, is that we don't even get a lawful society in exchange for all of this. On one hand, there's no privacy anywhere. On the other - have your car stolen or a bike? House broken into? Phone snatched out of your hands? Good luck getting anyone to care about this in the slightest. You'd think with all the surveillance tech we'd be living in a nightmare panoptico…

I mean, violent crime and homicide is essentially at all time lows (or at least since we all started living in dense cities after the war) in the UK.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#369

“Our deployments are intelligence-led and focused on identifying people wanted by the police or courts, including those suspected of serious offences and those who may be breaching bail conditions or court orders” This is crazy. Could easily be used to track protesters who went to the an event the police didn’t like.

Well, no, this is a group of people who police are actively looking to arrest because they believe they've committed a crime. That's a different thing.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster to solve, but by not patrolling haven't they given up on detterence?

Surely the deterrent is the possibility of being caught? If you're more likely to be caught due to the surveillance, logic would dictate that it's the greater deterrent.

My brother had his window smashed and bag stolen under a cctv camera in London. The police never even investigated.

I would hazard to say that wouldn't have happened had a police officer been stood there instead.

Some major shops in the UK have photographs of police officers on the door, because it reduces theft!

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